The next in the never ending series of malware deliveries is an email with the subject of FINAL WARNING FOR SENDING LIMIT BREACH pretending to come from Western Union – Agent Support Team <emeagentsupports.westernunion@gmail.com> delivers java Adwind / Java Jacksbot . They are using a totally different delivery method today, with the download link buried in the email that delivers a.exe file that in turn is renamed to a legitimate windows process winlogin.exe that extracts the embedded java,jar file to run the jacksbot Trojan.

We continue to be plagued daily by these fake financial themed emails containing java adwind or Java Jacksbot attachments. I have previously mentioned many of these HERE. We have been seeing these sort of emails almost every day. Today’s has a different subject, email content and delivery method to previous ones. From what I can see until recently many antivirus companies detected these as Java Adwind. Now they are calling them Java Jacksbot. From what I can see there is almost no difference between the functionality of the 2, although adwind tends to have a smaller file size. Many Antiviruses on Virus Total detect these heuristically.

Make Note: Java Adwind / Java Jacksbot are both very dangerous remote access backdoor Trojans, that have cross OS capabilities and can potentially run and infect any computer or operating system including windows, Apple Mac, Android and Linux. It however can only be active or infect you if you have Sun / Oracle Java installed. Along with most security professionals, I strongly urge you to uninstall java and not use it, unless you have a pressing need for it. The majority of domestic ( home ) users and small businesses have no need for Java on their computers. This Article from a couple of years ago explains why you should remove it. If you cannot remove it then it must be kept up to date and be extremely careful with what you download or open.

They use email addresses and subjects that will entice a user to read the email and open the attachment. A very high proportion are being targeted at small and medium size businesses, with the hope of getting a better response than they do from consumers.

18 November 2016 : Exceeded Limit Spreadsheet.exe Current Virus total detections: Payload Security shows lots of files being dropped /extracted from this file which is renamed by itself to winlogin.exe and in turn drops multitude of identical xml files and a java.jar file which is Java Jacksbot ( VirusTotal)

They use email addresses and subjects that will entice a user to read the email and open the attachment. A very high proportion are being targeted at small and medium size businesses, with the hope of getting a better response than they do from consumers.

One of the emails looks like:

From: Western Union – Agent Support Team <emeagentsupports.westernunion@gmail.com>

Date: Fri 18/11/2016 07:17

Subject: FINAL WARNING FOR SENDING LIMIT BREACH.

Attachment: see links

Body content:

Dear Sir/ Madam, It came to our notice that your agent terminal exceeded it’s send limit. As a result of this, We want you to verify your transaction report as attached. Respond urgently if you feel there is an error during our server computation. Regards, Thank you. Dianne Joy H. Iba񥺠OpEC5 Western Union Agent Support Team emeagentsupports@westernunion.com1 attachment (total 53.9 KB)View slide show (1)Download all as zip

——————————————– D I S C L A I M E R ———————————————-
The information transmitted is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from any computer. The Bank of The Bahamas Limited accepts no liability for any damage caused by any virus transmitted by this email

Screenshot:

All 3 links ( there is one behind the image) go to http://webkamagi.com/admin/images/Send Limit Exceeded.html where you see this screenshot that starts off with a circle and the words scanning and ends up looking like this. that auto-downloads a file from http://gicfamily.org/admin/file/Exceeded%20Limit%20Spreadsheet.exe ( if for some reason it doesn’t auto-download then the download button delivers the malware)

These malicious attachments normally have a password stealing component, with the aim of stealing your bank, PayPal or other financial details along with your email or FTP ( web space) log in credentials. Many of them are also designed to specifically steal your Facebook and other social network log in details. A very high proportion are Ransomware versions that encrypt your files and demand money ( about £350/$400) to recover the files.

All the alleged senders, amounts, reference numbers, Bank codes, companies, names of employees, employee positions, email addresses and phone numbers mentioned in the emails are all random. Some of these companies will exist and some won’t. Don’t try to respond by phone or email, all you will do is end up with an innocent person or company who have had their details spoofed and picked at random from a long list that the bad guys have previously found. The bad guys choose companies, Government departments and organisations with subjects that are designed to entice you or alarm you into blindly opening the attachment or clicking the link in the email to see what is happening.

Previous campaigns over the last few weeks have delivered numerous different download sites and malware versions. There are frequently 5 or 6 and even up to 150 download locations on some days, sometimes delivering the exactly same malware from all locations and sometimes slightly different malware versions. Dridex /Locky does update at frequent intervals during the day, sometimes as quickly as every hour, so you might get a different version of these nasty Ransomware or Banking password stealer Trojans.

This is another one of the files that unless you have “show known file extensions enabled“, can easily be mistaken for a genuine DOC / PDF / JPG or other common file instead of the .EXE / .JS file it really is, so making it much more likely for you to accidentally open it and be infected.

Be very careful with email attachments. All of these emails use Social engineering tricks to persuade you to open the attachments that come with the email. Whether it is a message saying “look at this picture of me I took last night” and it appears to come from a friend or is more targeted at somebody who regularly is likely to receive PDF attachments or Word .doc attachments or any other common file that you use every day.

The basic rule is NEVER open any attachment to an email, unless you are expecting it. Now that is very easy to say but quite hard to put into practice, because we all get emails with files attached to them. Our friends and family love to send us pictures of them doing silly things, or even cute pictures of the children or pets.

Never just blindly click on the file in your email program. Always save the file to your downloads folder, so you can check it first. Many malicious files that are attached to emails will have a faked extension. That is the 3 letters at the end of the file name. Unfortunately windows by default hides the file extensions so you need to Set your folder options to “show known file types. Then when you unzip the zip file that is supposed to contain the pictures of “Sally’s dog catching a ball” or a report in word document format that work has supposedly sent you to finish working on at the weekend, or an invoice or order confirmation from some company, you can easily see if it is a picture or document & not a malicious program.

If you see .JSor.EXE or .COM or .PIF or .SCR or .HTA .vbs, .wsf , .jse .jar at the end of the file name DO NOT click on it or try to open it, it will infect you.

While the malicious program is inside the zip file, it cannot harm you or automatically run. When it is just sitting unzipped in your downloads folder it won’t infect you, provided you don’t click it to run it. Just delete the zip and any extracted file and everything will be OK. You can always run a scan with your antivirus to be sure. There are some zip files that can be configured by the bad guys to automatically run the malware file when you double click the zip to extract the file. If you right click any suspicious zip file received, and select extract here or extract to folder ( after saving the zip to a folder on the computer) that risk is virtually eliminated. Never attempt to open a zip directly from your email, that is a guaranteed way to get infected. The best way is to just delete the unexpected zip and not risk any infection.